'"'- 32 provelnent in the R ialto's musical offer- ings. Although Roxy's background was, in the Inain, unaesthetic-for SOlne tilne he had been a bouncer in a Pennsylvania saloon-he had developed a taste for classical music. He and Rapee decided that the Alnerican public was culturally starved and they determined to clear up the situation. The campaign to bring high-class mUSIC to America started in a cagey way one evening shortly after the Rivoli opened. Rapee played a speedy rendition of "Old Black Joe," then immediately followed it up with the Soldiers' Chor- us from "Faust." The audience was startled hut not unreceptive. The re- sulting applause, though tentative and scattered, emboldened Rapee to try the Toreador March froln "Carmen" the next week. Soon Rapee was experi- Inenting with "March Slav" and the "1812 Overture," in which the Rivoli orchestra came out strong with the bells and Inade a big hit. Rapee leaned heav- ily on Tchaikovsky for SOlne time. The tnusical awakening of the pioneer coun- try was slow, but it was refreshingly steady. Before long, he had got by with one or two of the noisier \Vagner num- bers. The audiences seelned to take par- ticular pleasure in instrulnen ts like the big drulns and the gongs. As a conse- quence, Rapee worked doggedly to de- vise special effects of one kind and an- other. He threw in whistles, pans, rat- tles, anitna] cries, and bird calls. E ven- tually, at Radio City, he scored a trelnen- dous hit with Respighi's "The Pines of Rome," which has a strong part for an artificial nightingale in the closing section. Roxy was dclighted with these suc- :::::.:. t;.-X-$: running the new theatre, and relations between the two men got progressively worse. The break came when, learn- ing that a seventh of Philadelphia's pop- ulation was Jewish, Rapee essayed a re- ligious coup shortly before Passover by hiring Cantor Rosenblatt, the weU- known synagogue singer, for the rather princely sum of twenty-five hundred dollars a week. Fox exhibited his annoy- ance by buying up Rapee's contract. Crowds queued up for several blocks to hear Rosenblatt, but Fox stuck to his decision and Rapee went. Rapee's next move took him to Ber- lin and a great success. UF A, the big German film cOInpany, hired him as a specialist in .l\Inerican-style entertain- ment, to adIninister first aid to its chain of ailing movie houses. Full of con- fidence after his Alnerican triuInphs, he went. to work with no inhibitions. He ripped out the whole interior of Ber- lin's largest theatre, the Palast aln Zoo, and installed a gaudy Broadway décor of red plush. Then he pulled the orches- tra out of a hole in the floor, put it on the stage, and built it up to eighty-fi ve men, featuring six French saxophone players and an An1erican drumIner he had found in a Paris honky-tonk. On opening night, the crowds fought for tickets. Rapee became falnous in Berlin. Soon he organized a string of bands he called Rapee Jazz Symphonicas and had them playing all over Germany. During a year's stay'there his incolne was about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Many of. Rapee's friends have since asked him why, in the face of this acclaÏtn and profit, he elected to leave. His answer reflects his devotion to the new world: he reIneIn- bered his duty to the mu- sically undernourished. Be- fore he left, however, he made a triumphant appear- ance as a guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and tossed off a waltz called "Ach Du," which had a sensational run in the beer gardens. Back in America, Rapee began a large-scale Inar- keting of his talent for choosing n1usic to fit a mood. At the Rialto, he had idled away the tÎtne between stage shows by sit- ting in the audience and writing down the titles of compositions that various sequences of the filtns sug- gested to hÎtn. When he fel t particularly in the cesses. He took to attending the rehears- als in order to soak up as much In usic as possible. His own conversion to culture was practically complete. On rare occa- sions he reverted to the habits of his bouncer days, but it was never for very long. Once he broke the jaw of a porter who hissed while Rapee was rehearsing the orchestra, but he regretted it right away and sent the man to a first-class hospital, all expenses paid. Roxy's en- thusiasln for what was going on reached such proportions that he became con- vinced that they needed a bigger thea- tre.. They moved to the Capitol in 1920, picking up in the migration enough ad- ditional musicians to maintain a nice balance between the size of the orches- tra and the lavishness of the lobby. ALTHOUGH Rapee struggled to n keep his mind on musical crusad- ing, he suffered a cultural setback in 1 924. Willialn Fox, th n one of the big Inen in the moving-picture industry, asked him to become the manager and In usical director of the F"ox Theatre, his new three-Inillion-dollar cinema palace in Philadelphia. Rapee knuckled under for six hundred and fifty a week, but shortly found that the palace played \Vesterns almost exclusively and that the Western-lnovie public was not quite ready for the classics. Out of pure horedom, he began to dabble in jazz. He wás not prepared, however, to go the whole hog. Instead, he eased his conscience by taking several semi- classical nlunbers and hopping thelTI up. The result, according to :Fox, was even more horrible than jazz. Fox started to cOInplain about the way Rapee was - d t,.,::\ ::@, , _7/ :' ::::", \ ."y.r... '.,:;,: oii:{::JP ' :::ø.& .íi".:;::i':;;;::::: . "....--: , : " ::">>' ;::it r_ _ "::A,,"' ' oÞ:W :"-""-''Ioòo.:o:.''.'''''.... ::%;:ri. '<' .,..." ' : , iiÆ: : :' :, :;:: DR.E.AMS OF GLOR. Y